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Topic: Bye, Bye Blackbird OOC (Read 762 times)

Players, please post your characters here, backstories and then sheets. I'd like characters only as the first 10 entries.

Standard expectations : Stuff straight from the book:Morality: While I think characters should have some disagreements over morality I'd like everyone to have the same general direction, being good. I don't want to deal with particularly evil, sick or twisted characters. Generally speaking characters should not want to leave a trail of bodies on every run. I don't expect everyone to run around with only non-leathal weapons, this is a dystopia after all, but whether it's because a character wants to avoid drawing the attention of the cops, or because they feel every life is sacred, wonton killing has heavy consequences. I'd like to avoid violent psychopaths for characters. On the flip-side and to a lesser degree I don't expect there to be many Paladins in the Sixth world. If you want to be one of those runners who's out fighting the good fight, that's great! But a character that's particularly preachy isn't gonna work well with the guy who's just there to get a paycheck. I don't expect all the characters to be best friends, but you have to have similar moral foundations in order to work with each other.

Racisim This is a big part of the Sixth World and I have no problem implementing it against you guys. And I suggest that you consider the prejudices your character might have. Whether it something as mild as thinking trolls are kinda freaky looking or that Sasquatches aren't people no matter what anyone says. Consider prejudice tied to ethnicity and gender as well. While never hitting a woman is chivalrous and great and all that, it does come with preconceived ideas. The same can be said for many ethnicity, the great ghost dance wasn't THAT long ago, maybe your character assumes all natives are magic, or maybe you have a native character who remembers that it wasn't that long ago that white-man called for the extermination of Natives and magic was the only reason it didn't happen. And as a game it's ok for your character to express in-character prejudices. However, there are two instances of Racism I don't want in our game. First nothing from players, simple as that. Racist OOC comments will make you not welcome in this game. Second is where it disrupts the flow of game overly much. An elf supremacist, might be fun to play, an elf hater might be fun to play. But, why are they in the same party together? And would they really trust each other enough to function, or stay together after this one job is over?

Violence I touched on this a bit with morality. But there are a few lines that need to go here too. Graphic detail is unnecessary. One can describe graphic violence without graphic detail and thanks to Hollywood I'm pretty sure most of us can picture something worse then what we could type out. Even then, graphic violence should have an effect on a character, much like killing. It's one thing to see a guy take a bullet or a beating. But a character finding someone who had been tortured to death after several days will at the very least be making some composure checks.

Sexuality, I've found that role-playing and being behind a character can be a great safe and interesting way to explore sexuality. I've also found a tendency for gamers to be very immature about it. So please feel free to make a character with an alternative sexuality. In a world of magic, crazy body modifications, poverty, decadency, virtual reality and survival, sexual freedom is pretty much the norm. However picking up a hooker on every other street corner, or trying to hit on every person you meet with a 6 charisma is annoying and slows down the game, so feel free to role-play the sexuality of characters with a few limitations. First no need for explicit detail, if that's what you want they have different forums for that. We're here to role-play not fap. Second there will be no IC Rape, not with force, drugs or mind control. Feel free to have it as part of your characters history but it will not happen IC. Third as with racism, I don't want to see any OOC homophobia, transphobia etc. If someone want to make an LGBT character go for it, no one here will give you drek for it, if they do they're out.

My thanks to Moneyspider for posting these excellent ground rules. While obvious to me, I'm very aware that without the obvious all sorts of drek hits the air circulation device.

I've also set-up, (I hope), a rolz.org room for Shadowrun:TNG. https://rolz.org/dr?room=Shadowrun%3A%20TNG there is a line close to the top right with Roll : Dice Room : Feedback : About. Click on Dice Room and put in your SR name or your chara name, put Shadowrun: TNG in the Room Name box and you should be good to go. I'll be able to see your rolls when I log in, and if you click on the die to the left of your name on the line of the roll you want to show it'll make link codes so that you can post your rolls in the OOC thread.

[spoiler]Background: Was born in 2010 just as the world was starting to go haywire. Childhood was kinda chaotic, with my parents trying to make it seem normal. Was a boyscout for a while. Family got caught in Seattle when the US fell apart in 2014, so I grew up here. Dad worked odd jobs. We were lower middle class. Everything changed in 2022. I was on a camp out with the scouts when my best friend was attacked by dogs. I wasn't particularly formidable, but I was hitting them with my hiking stick trying to beat them off of him. I became more frustrated as I was ineffective. Suddenly, my swings with the stick started knocking them off. I had awakened and was using my magic to hurt the dogs. They ran, and I collapsed. That same best friend, while recovering from his injuries, goblinized into an ork (it was the beginning of goblinization). His family was relocated to an internment camp and I never saw them again. The biggest change of all, toward the end of the year, my parents died in the second wave of VITAS in 2022. I was taken in by a family that my parents knew. I hid my abilities from them and tried to be normal. My foster parents owned a construction company, and I worked for them for my early adult life, rarely using my abilities. I finished high school in 2028, and worked for them from then until 2040. During this time, magic was becoming more accepted. I used the money I made and my spare time to take correspondence courses for magic. Somewhere about 2040, when I was in beginning my 30's, I got restless and tired of the dreary, boring life, and I started developing my awakened abilities, and using them to do quasi legal jobs on the side. A brush with police put me on the outs with my foster family, and I was told to shape up or ship out. Ship out I did, and spent the next ten years working as a shadowrunner for the excitement.

Due to mysterious circumstances in 2050, I left the shadows. I spent the next 20 years living anonymously in the Barrens. I know them well, I know how to get by. At the age of 60, I'm tired of getting by, and I started working with a private investigator named Mike a couple of years ago. I have recently struck out on my own as a PI with the help of a lawyer I know. Ito Takaneshi put me in touch with some associates of his and I borrowed enough money to open up my own PI practice.

Recently spent a short stay in the hospital and rehab. I was working on a case, investigating some unusual activity, when I had a run in with a toxic mage. Toxic Mage 1, Jed 0. Trashed my car and my body. Still a little weak, but I’m down to my last 40 Nuyen, its dinner time and rent is almost due…

Contacts:Mikhail Anatoli Mouskov: Mike is an orc of russian decent. Not part of the Vor, but has associations, partly just by being a tough guy russian. He is my mentor as a PI. My one true friend. We met while he was working a case in the Barrens. He had been caught off guard by a gang while looking for a missing person. I stepped in and helped him survive the situation. Soon after, I started working for him. Very few people know that the nickname his mother called him was Nishka. Contact made with him by commcall. Uses: physical legwork, street rumors, extra contacts, getting a beer.

Escher: Escher is a hacker contact that I met through Mike. We use him when we need to follow digital clues. We have never met, as he will only meet in VR. Contact is made with him through a guild in a Matrix RPG. He seems to be available 24/7, leading us to speculate that he is actually a group of hackers, or an AI, or something unusual. Uses: Information, digital surveillance

Rosalie Valdez: mid 30's Puerto Rican descent. Works as lead technician in the city's crime lab. Mike uses her to process his own forensics evidence on the sly for a fee. DNA testing, residue analysis. As lead technician, she has access to the police records system, and can provided copies of police reports off record, even the sections of the report that aren't public release. She seems to enjoy flirting with this old man, but of course she wouldn't be interested, right? Contact is made by contacting her in her Second Life matrix game. Uses: Information, forensics legwork, Background checks, possible misplacement of evidence against someone (possibility is unexplored by this character).

Connor and Quinn Keegan. Pair of Irish descent gypsy brothers who run a black market store out of a small collection of vans and sedans that set up and various locations in the Barrens (abandoned warehouses, parking garages, etc). They put an add in the classifieds each day in code to tell their customers where they set up. Always seen together, Connor does the business and speaks with a strong Irish accent. Quinn takes care of security, and is quiet and moody. Funny thing is that when he talks, he has no accent. Contact: call is placed to an answering service, and then Connor or one of his assistants will call you back. Delivery is possible for a fee, depending on the item and your location. They will not deliver to Bellvue or Downtown due to security risk. Uses: Gear, jobs, information, more contacts.[/spoiler]

Positive Qualities:These qualities reflect Snap's life in the Redmond Barrens. She's street savvy and has had to improvise to survive.Drug TolerantJack of all Trades, Master of noneSchool of Hard Knocks

Negative Qualities:Did You Just Call Me Dumb? - A street upbringing and time spent with Carroll & Sons has given Snap an attitude, but her intellect and charisma enable her to keep it subtle.Driven: Aid Technomancers - She's been shat on for being a Technomancer and she knows others are persecuted. She'll help them. All of them.Electronic Witness - Being black-bagged more than once, she keeps an open line to record what she sees and hears.Social appearance Anxiety - Started from the bottom, now we're here. OK, we're not quite here yet, but part of getting there is looking the part.

Backstory: Himura Aiko was born to Himura Hiroki (Her Father) and Himura Akemi (Her Mother) on the 25th of December, 2062; with black hair and light blue eyes. Her father is a renown neurosurgeon and her mother a respected pediatric oncologist.

Aiko was diagnosed at the age of 3 with a previously unknown progressive immune deficiency disease which slowly reduced her ability to fight off and any outside organism. For the next three years, she was sick nearly every day; one notably scary event was one day after eating some old bread Aiko got deathly sick due to bread mold growing in her esophagus. Slowly she got weaker and her body grew more sensitive to potential pathogens, causing her to go into anaphylactic shock after smelling a flower when she was six. Hiroki and Akemi had their daughter permanently hospitalized two months before her seventh birthday, in a sterile isolation room, after it became obvious that she was in great danger if she were to remain home.

When Aiko was seven and a half years old she was finally let outside with a spacesuit like setup; but she did not find it to be fulfilling and spent as much time as possible on the matrix. She did not like having to schedule time outside days in advance and needing an hour of prep to be able to see her parents. To fill the empty time, she began to watch and experience as much media as the parental controls would let her. Aiko began during these years, a blog, about all the trid shows, animes, and other matrix medias she had grown to love, she penned these these reviews and articles under the handle Penguin.

When she was 13 years old her father had succeeded in getting an expert doctor friend to develop a surgery that could cure his daughter. Himura Akemi, her mother, expressed fear that the surgery might fail; and that she thought she had seen shadows from her past returning. Hiroki reassured her saying “I will not lose any more years, I will hold my daughter once more.” Despite the risks the surgery was done; however, there were complications. Somehow during the operation some outside pollutant entered the operating theater and Aiko went into major shock and she was clinically dead for 2 minutes and 43 seconds. Six months later she had still not awoken from the coma that had started during the surgery; however, brain scans indicated that her mind was still active, dreaming.

Now she was even more isolated and was imprisoned in her body. Aiko woke and slept still unable to move or even open her eyes. Distraught Hiroki and Akemi divided to attempt to fix things one last time. They ordered the doctors to hand over their daughter; and Himura Hiroki performed the surgery himself , implanting both bioware and cyberware to let her have a second chance at some kind of life. Her mind was reconnected but not to her body but to the matrix.

Now she sits, still and deathlike on her medical bed, under the constant care of the hospital. But in her mind, she travels the matrix like she was born into it and spends her days absorbing as much media as possible. To her parents to has been six months since the second surgery; but to her it has been a lifetime, and all in all this time she pushed past the parental controls and watches matrix shows constantly as they are now familiar any the outside world, foreign. Aiko now snoops around hoping to find media before it is out or some secret trix show, to satisfy her boredom and to make her blog the best it can be.

Lena Deskatchova, 25 female, dwarven. Mother tongue: Polish.Born in the Lodz slums, she was one of the lucky ones, selected by the authorities after testing well on childhood aptitude tests and qualifying for state school (only later in life did it become clear that her capabilities were routed in the astral). She managed a decent education and went into policing, Her natural charisma and charm made advancing throught the ranks a dream and she ended up moving to the UK in her early 20's to work for the Met police in london; returning home to Poland only when her kid sister disappeared without a trace and abandoning her position in the 'met when her compassionate leave expired. She failed her return to work interviews and refused all counselling, her stubborn streak too strong to accept the help offered, instead falling into the shadows of Poland's old industrial heartlands by nature of having to pay the bills somehow. Her interrogation and intense front-line policing training comes in more than handy for negotiation and diffusing situations as well as surpressing potential combatants before they get unruly.Always one for a scrap as a kid, police combat training gave her the discipline to regularly best foes and she trains most days if able.She currently lives in a drek-hole of an apartment in east Lodz, opposite a steel-fab factory on the wrong end of town.

Romaine Kurt; French-Polish decker {4},3 Skirted social circles since their early teens, they had a bit of an on/off relationship but stayed friends and both ended up in law-enforcement of some description. Romaine fell foul of the Polish national police over inappropriate use of surveillance and was scape-goated by his boss. Discharged from the force dishonourably, the shadows now pay his bills.

Zuzanna Kowalski; Mountain ranger 3,3 A good friend from her teenage years, she went to work for the national park's security services and is a skilled outdoorsman; trained in dealing with the paracritters and wildlife of the wild borderland of the Tatra mountains. Well connected with other outdoorsy folk, she's a wealth of knowledge of passes, W-zone hideouts and big-game hunting.

Petr Smolensk; Mechanic 1,1 An Ork in Lodz who runs a very small family run repair shop known for being discreet. Specialises in the off-road vehicles common to the area.

Gloria Dixon (Connections 1, Loyalty 1)A bartender who works at The Havens, one of your standard shady saloons in Seattle. She’s is a part time adult simvid actress and her figure tells you why. She works at the bar to “get inspiration” for her roles and to make a bit of side money. She does hear some interesting and occasionally profitable things from her clientele who tend to say the oddest things when they forget anyone’s listening. Mostly I just go there to try to keep the demons at bay, but I tip pretty well so I occasionally hear a couple second-hand rumors from her.

Herbie (Connections 1, Loyalty 1)This slime ball human is a great example of an oxygen thief. He is a bookie with a heart of stone. And three trolls. We have a love-hate relationship. He loves taking my money if I lose and hates giving it back if I win. If I can’t find a game going somewhere I can always find him willing to take a bet on almost anything. There are days when I just cannot stay away from fragging punks like this. I hate myself for the weakness, but I cannot stop. The good news is that I win almost as often as I lose, so it has not driven me into poverty. Yet.

Virtual Goddess (Connections 4, Loyalty 2) I have no idea who this person is, or even where this person is. All conversation is done through some sort of voice modulation so I do not even know if my fixer is male or female, despite the matrix handle. I do know that he/she knows a lot about gangs. Big gangs, little gangs, European gangs……..any gangs. I go to him/her when I am looking for the next job. He/she hooks me up with a gang somewhere that is looking for my skill set. We seem to be on good terms, but who knows? This contact is currently voided. Virtual Goddess accepted a contract to have Yelena killed and set her up for some assassins.

Sam Webster (Connections 5, Loyalty 3)I thought I knew who Sam Webster was, but that proved false. The Sam I thought I knew is handsome and suave, and very good in bed. The "Sam" I met later is a beautiful woman, who I can guess is very practiced in bed. Still he/she knows a lot and has great connections.

Yelena's Background, Part I. I am putting this in several sections due to its length. Boom is trying to show me hoe to set it up as a link to a single post and I will do that as soon as I get smart enough to use his technique. In the meantime, here is Part I.

Yelena Petrovna Talinovsky was born on may 23rd, 2011 to parents she never met and never knew. She would have been an ordinary Russian child except for the pointed ears, snowy white hair, and violet eyes but these features put her in the category of freak. Her parents had two "healthy and normal" children already and did not want this....thing.......in the house. The state had been broadcasting information for days about something called Unexplained Genetic Expression or UGE, informing all that these abnormals must be turned in to the state. Her parents, afraid that they, too, would be interrogated for just having her, unceremoniously dumped her on the steps of the small church in the next village. The priest there realized that he had a UGE on his hands, but had heard rumors of what was being done to those unfortunate enough to be given to the state. Ivan Yerovik was a simple man, but a devout one, and he prayed for an answer to his dilemma, receiving what he believed to be divine guidance. He showed the infant a kindness rare in humanity at the time and did not turn her in keeping her in a special secret room in the small church and arranging for milk from a local girl that had lost her son in childbirth. He told the young woman that he was giving the milk to a girl in the next village who could not breast feed. He gave the infant a name because she had none, drawing on one of his favorite children's stories for inspiration. He was there when she learned to crawl and walk and talk and tried to pass on as much to the little girl as he could about God and what a miracle she was. Of course, most young children do not really grasp such concepts, but Ivan felt that he was getting through to her in some fashion. To Yelena, the priest was both mother and father and her entire world was a small room and the bit of road that she could see through a chink in the wooden wall at the back of her cubicle. When Yelena was three, the priest let slip to a close friend that he was caring for a UGE child at the church and this "friend" repaid the confidence by contacting the authorities to collect the reward for unregistered abnormals.

Three men of the State Security Service showed up in a large black car and forcibly removed Yelena from the secret room over the protests of the priest. One of the large men drug Yelena screaming from the church and put her across his shoulder. Yelena reached out her arms to the priest, who was the only other person she knew, and called out to a God that was determined to not listen to the plaintive cries of a young Elf. The last of the state goons out the door turned to the priest, drew his gun, and shot the kind man four times. Yelena stopped believing in God and started hating humans in that same moment. Although she was too young to really know what hate is, the sight of her father bleeding to death on the steps of the church would stay with her for a very long time and would help fuel her actions. Yelena was thrown into the back of the car and taken to one of the state-run "re-educational camps", where she was put into confinement with others of "her kind". These camps were old gulags converted to a new use; a place to contain the genetic abnormals. Yelena was originally confined with 33 other Elves and 25 Dwarves in Camp 14. Some hints of the atrocities that occurred in these camps have trickled out of Siberia, but the real horrors were much worse. The Russian state was determined to find out what these creatures were and, more importantly, how they could make use of them. Physicians and scientists dissected and conducted experiments on these children, determined to unlock the secrets of their existence. Every week brought more UGE children to camp 14 and soon the place housed four times as many abnormals as there were beds to put them in. There was also less food than necessary and the children were subjected to privation and near starvation. Of course, that was part of the experiment, too.

Yelena fought and scrabbled as hard as any of the others; certainly harder than those who gave up and died. During the seven years that Yelena existed in Camp 14, she saw 189 Elves and 67 Dwarves die either at the hands of the doctors or from simple starvation and disease. The horrors of their existence forced some to become cannibals to survive. And Yelena survived. She suffered through her own series of tests and the experiments the doctors did to her, as well as the abuses from the barracks guards, who were overly fond of withholding food just to see what the kids would do. When she was six, Yelena found an answer, one that she would carry with her for the rest of her life. She had made the mistake of becoming friends with another young elven girl, Siga. The two became as close as it was possible to be in a place like camp 14. When Siga was singled out by one of the guards for a beating, Yelena made the mistake of being noticed trying to help her friend. The guard began beating both girls, punching and kicking their small bodies again and again, damaging internal organs but Siga and Yelena refused to let go of life. The guard beat them senseless before throwing both girls out into the freezing temperatures of a Siberian winter and left after warning the other kids in the barracks that trying to help either girl would bring them the same beating. Yelena, able to only see from one eye due to the blood flowing into the other from the cuts on her face, could barely make out the limp form of her friend next to her but she managed to stretch out an arm that had been broken in the beating and clasp the hand of her unconscious friend. The cold stole in on the dying girls and Siga woke up enough to smile once at the girl who had been her only friend. "It is OK to die. I am going back to God." With those words, Siga left the mortal world. Yelena watched her friend die then said, more to herself than to the corpse next to her, "There is no God, Siga. I hope you go somewhere warm where there is plenty of food." As the bitter cold seeped in and threatened to finish what the guard had begun, Yelena struggled to remain alive, fighting against her injuries and the weather. And losing. As she slipped into unconsciousness she could not talk but silently railed, not against how unfair all of this was, but against death, still fighting the inevitable. Then a voice came to her, promising to help her if she accepted the Shadow. Without hesitation she mentally responded "Yes." and died.

Only she did not die. Somehow she survived and managed to crawl back into the barracks. Some of the kids wanted to throw her back out, afraid that they would be accused of helping her and so face the wrath of the guard, but others helped the girl to a bed and gave her what warmth they could share. Siga's body was also brought inside and used to provide some nourishment to the others. Many of the kids were hoping that Yelena would also die from her injuries but she stubbornly clung to life, drawing on the shadow to heal her. In the morning, the guard returned and simply asked if the girls had been tenderized enough from the beating he had given them. He did not recognize Yelena when he saw her; to him she had been just another nameless and faceless child that he had killed. He was brutish enough that the killings had long ago stopped bothering him and one dead child was just like the next and the next. Yelena remembered the man and marked him for justice for what he had done, not that she had much chance of getting justice here, but it helped give her a purpose for living. The experiments and examinations continued, but she was often overlooked when the guards came to select their victims, something she quickly put down to the help of the shadow.

Yelena was 10 when Goblinization hit in 2021. "Goblinization". Another humanity term to try to explain what they could not understand. Orks and Trolls appeared everywhere, making UGE seem tame in comparison. The state's reaction was familiar; round up the new abnormals and take them to the camps. Unfortunately for the Russian State, adult Orks and Trolls were not as pliant as the Elven and Dwarven children had been. A group of guards escorting some of the new freaks to Camp 14 made the unfortunate decision to try to kill one of the trolls when he resisted going through the gates. The troll broke free of his restraints and killed the four men in the truck he was in. In a frenzy of bloodletting, he freed the rest of the prisoners on the trucks and led a rampage through the camp, setting the prisoners free, including a grateful Yelena. The young Elf, although only ten, picked up a rifle from a dead human guard and refused to give it up when an Ork demanded it. A passing troll by the name of Nikko saw the exchange and allowed her to keep the weapon and even gave her some bullets for it, which she gratefully used to kill several of the guards. The first man to die at her hands was the guard who had killed Siga. Yelena put bullets into the man's knees before putting one through his head. The young girl smiled to herself, completely convinced that the shadow had worked it out to allow her to bring justice for her friend. In the chaos, she found Nikko surrounded by humans who seemed to be close to overwhelming even that mountain of a man. Yelena killed three of the men, allowing the Troll to finish the others. A grateful Nikko took the young Elf with him into the Siberian wilderness, where he formed a gang of bandits and began to prey on the surrounding human villages for food, weapons and money. The small Elf with the too-long rifle was allowed to train with it and discovered that somewhere in her DNA existed some genes for a natural ability with guns. She was......talented. Within a few weeks she was the gang's long range support for their raids. She delighted in sending her small messengers of death into human bodies. Have I mentioned yet how much she hated humans in those days? Many was the time that she would pass through a gutted village and watch impassively as she walked past a small child standing near his dead parents outside a burning home, knowing that she was leaving him to a certain death from cold or starvation. Back then it was just another human and what did she owe humans anyway? These days she cannot drink enough vodka to get the faces out of her memory.

Nikko was always careful to limit the size of the gang to 20 metas. "Less is ineffective and more is unwieldy." And for almost 13 years his caution and care paid off. The gang moved from one remote area of Siberia to another, always staying a step or two ahead of the authorities. Yet for all his care in selecting just the right metas for the gang he slipped up in the summer of 2034. The hole left by a death was filled by an Ork who was part of a state anti-crime unit and the gang was betrayed during a raid. Yelena and the others fought like lions, knowing that death waited for them if they were captured. The thenty-three your old woman was knocked unconscious during the fight and woke up in the back of a transport truck being raped by one of the guards. During the three day ride to the detention center she was raped by each of the four men in the truck several times. She stopped resisting after the third beating. Have I said before how much she used to hate humans? She found out from one of the other prisoners that only she and the other three in the truck had survived the firefight and that Nikko had to be killed four times before he was finally put down for good. She was tossed to the ground at the detention center, a fenced compound that bore a striking resemblance to Camp 14. It appeared that the Russian State was not original when it came to their prison camps.

From the detention center to prison was a short trial and sentence. Life without parole was the judgment passed down and she was sent to a real prison, a facility that made the earlier camps look a lot like paradise. The state had grown tired of trying to understand metas and just threw them in prison now, relying on the harsh life there to save them a bullet. Yelena was determined to survive and found that there were men and metas alike who were willing to give her a degree of protection for the privilege of having sex with her, at least until the her newness wore off. In short order, she learned learned the ropes and slept her way to the underboss of the toughest and most brutal gang in the prison. These people did not care if she, or anyone else, was human or metahuman. They just cared about loyalty and ability. She had found the Vory, or Russian mob, and they pretty much ruled the prison. She found that she needed to do more for them than just sex and set herself up to be needed. The Vory was family and honor and everything she thought she needed and she realized that she wanted to make a place for herself with them. She earned the first of a number of Vory tattoos by killing a member of a rival gang. She had her Vory oaths inked onto her upper arms in scrolls and she would recite the words to herself every day. The prison ink artist added a large sun on her left breast where it was centered on her nipple and was marked with the number of the prison. More killing and more sex kept her near the top of the gang. The prison tattoos she added indicated her rise and her achievements. Each year, a ray would be added to the sun, indicating her survival of another year and containing the number of the people she had killed for the Vory that year. She grew proud of each tattoo she earned, knowing that they bought her respect in the only currency the prison inmates were likely to understand. She showed that she could be as vicious and cruel as any of the rest of the Vory in the prison and was admitted to the inner circle when her lover, Nicolai, became her mentor, teaching her what she needed to learn of the mob and their brand of justice and loyalty. He was a brutally sadistic bastard and Yelena easily took to the sort of life he offered her. Nicolai was the man at the side of the Vory Bratva boss of the prison, responsible for enforcing the decrees of the boss and Yelena became his primary tool. He would send her out into the prison to carry out his ruthless orders, and she did everything she was told to do. In ten years she had 73 kills, each marked on her chest. She learned that all humans were not bad, just most of them. She also learned that being in prison gave her more freedom than she had experienced for most of her life. Sex, drugs, and vodka flowed into and through the prison and Yelena experimented with all of it. It was here that she was first introduced to Bliss and she would use it to unwind after a mission, enjoying the feeling almost as much as she enjoyed the killing. The prison was her home and the Vory was her family, but this life was not meant to last.

The prison erupted in gang violence in 2045, when several small gangs banded together to end the rule of the Vory. Much of her Bratva died amid the confusion and devastation, but so did many others. The prison superintendent became one of the early victims of the riot when his office was firebombed and ransacked. An enterprising hacker managed to gain access to the files and wipe everyone's record before he, too, died. Yelena managed to escape with Nicolai and a handful of other Vory confederates and all made their way to Moscow, where they were accepted into the local Bratva. She fell into the new gang with ease, even convincing the boss that she was good with a rifle. After a test, she was made the group's sniper and given additional practice and training. it was during this time that she fell in love with the Ares brand of weapons, swearing that they were the only ones who knew how to build a decent gun. For a while she had nearly the same freedoms as she had experienced in prison, only without the bars. Two years after entering the Bratva, she replaced Tsina Molovna as the boss' mistress. This human woman pretended to accept the change in status, but secretly vowed vengeance. She waited patiently for seven months before contacting a rival gang and putting her plan into operation. Nicolai had been sent to meet with the representatives of several other Moscow Bratvas, giving Tsina the opening she had been waiting for. She had contacted a non-Vory gang whose boss desperately wanted vengeance against the Bratva boss for having his wife and daughter killed. Tsina gave them the codes and passwords to bypass the security features of the Bratva's safe house. In a night of brutality, the gang was wiped out to a man. Tsina captured Yelena and the Hellfire, her former boss and lover before dousing the man with gasoline and setting him on fire so that Yelena could watch him die. She then told Yelena that her protecter, Nicolai, had been assassinated at the meeting then she personally shot Yelena three times in the chest and dumped her body in the frigid river. Yelena drew upon the shadow again and forced it to serve her as she had been promised. Somehow she refused to die and managed to crawl from the river and to a place of safety unknown to her rival. To her knowledge, every one of her family was dead, including Nicolai. Her world had ended and she needed a new one. With that in mind, she left Moscow, but kept Tsina's face close to her hardened heart, vowing to get justice for her fallen family some day.

Yelena's Background, Part II. Second part of the story. The third part covers the Date Night and Long Kiss Goodnight stories and I have not finished them yet.

Dead to all who knew her, Or rather all who had known her being dead, Yelena was free to go anywhere. During the long days that led to her physical recovery, Yelena's heart turned to the Vory and she considered taking her case to the ruling judges, but it would be her voice against that of Tsina Molovna and the Vory judges would need more than Yelena's word to rule against her rival, so she decided to just let herself remain dead and become someone new. Still, in her heart she remained Vory and still recited her oaths every day. After she was strong again, she gathered a few resources, thanked the man who had healed her, and left Moscow, wandering from Russia into the countries of Greater Europe, picking up work where she could. She found that there are many criminal gangs that are willing to take on a free lance sniper for a time. She took on the identity of Wanderer and moved from city to city across Europe, spending a few weeks in Germany before moving on to live for a few months in France and Italy then over to Spain. She made useful contacts wherever she went and her policy to remain neutral and never get involved in the politics of the gangs she worked for helped her move from one gang to the next once a job was completed. By the time she made it to London, she had been on the road for two years and her reputation had expanded with her, making her sort of a star of the dark side. She was one of the go-to people if a gang wanted someone dead and it did not matter to her who she was paid to kill. Politicians, policemen, bankers, gangland turncoats, and even witnesses about to testify came under her scope and died after receiving one of her messengers of death. Oddly enough she still recited the Vory oaths to herself every morning, giving part of her sanity something to grab hold of. The shadow took an important role as well as she slid further and further into darkness.

Of all the countries of Greater Europe, Yelena loved England the most. The gangs there were more than willing to make use of her talent with a rifle and she had access to all the sex and drugs one could want and then some. She was tempted to try to find a steady employer in London but took a job in Oslo, Norway while considering her options. The job was an easy hit on a banker who had decided to turn evidence of certain money laundering activities by some politicians over to the Norwegian police. The man was under police protection, but Yelena had discovered years earlier that people make mistakes if you give them enough time to do so and the banker made a fatal one just two weeks after the Keeb assassin arrived in Oslo. The job complete and Yelena paid, she debated returning to London straight away, but decided to remain in Norway for a few days; a decision that would change her life. Yelena was eating outside a street café in a district of the city that saw few tourists when she first heard it. Jazz. Something in the music touched what was left of her soul and she went inside to listen to more of it and saw Brent Leans for the first time. He was just one of four people playing in a quartet on a small stage, but the soft music flowed from his saxophone like pure magic and she only had eyes for the middle aged man. She did not know him, but she wanted to. She did not know the music but she wanted to hear more of it. Yelena stayed late that night, hoping to be able to talk to the saxophone player, but he had company so she did not interrupt, although she did ask the barman about him and was told that he was some sort of hot shot, world famous musician over from the UCAS who had apparently burned out on concerts and the pressures of the business. The barman had not heard of him before, but he was a friend of the owner, who had given him a gig at the cafe. He winked when he told her that the man was quite friendly with the women who came to listen to him. Still interested, Yelena returned to the café night after night for several days in a row, letting the music talk to her in ways nothing else ever had. Brent finally noticed her and talked to her over drinks, thinking at first that she was some groupie of the sort of life he had left behind him. When he found out that she had never heard of him until a few nights earlier, he asked her to stay on for a bit. She stayed. And five years passed by. Yelena put her rifle case in a closet in the small walk-up she shared with Brent, pulling it out only to do routine maintenance on the rifle and pistol inside it when Brent was away from the apartment. The neighborhood was not London but she grew to love its quaint charms and seediness more than she had ever loved the bright lights, clubs, and casinos of the larger city. She loved and was loved for the first time in her life. He sat at her side as she went through the painful withdrawals from Bliss, giving her someone and something to cling to during the hardest of times. He fed her when she was recovering from the ordeal and too weak to lift a spoon or fork. She felt that he completed her and she was willing to trust another person as she never had before.

He played the saxophone like almost no one on earth could at the time. When he was home and sober, he taught Yelena to love and to play the sax, giving her a love for jazz and how to forgive herself. The forgiving part was the hardest because he had apparently never forgiven himself for something in his own past, but he managed to get Yelena to forgive herself. He never told her exactly why he was in Oslo, but she knew it was a woman. Yelena had used simple research tools and found out that he had been married and had two sons, but had divorced his wife two years earlier after a very public breakdown on the stage of a large arena while giving a concert. Charges of rampant infidelity flew from both husband and wife but the news articles of the time listed "irreconcilable differences" as the cause of the divorce. Yelena could read between the lines and knew that there was something more to it. She had her hints when Brent would come home reeking of alcohol, strange perfume, and sex. She put up with his cheating because he always did come home to her and she believed that he did love her more than the others. Her hope was that perhaps he would realize that some day and stay away from the other women. She was good enough with the sax that she was soon playing with him on the small cafe stage and sometimes instead of him when he was off drinking and sleeping around on her. She had a natural talent with the instrument and the music and she poured her years of suffering and pain into the music and it came out as something altogether different; something good and worth listening to. He taught her his greatest piece and she learned to play it with him. It was the best thing he had ever written and he shared it with her, making it their song. Then he died.

Yelena had left the house in the morning to go shopping for groceries at the local market and returned to a quiet house, which was strange, as Brent was fond of spending the mornings practicing his music. She put the groceries on the table and went to their bedroom, finding him sitting at the small desk there. He had apparently had a massive heart attack and died in the chair, a letter from the morning post in his hand. Reading it, she found that Brent had been planning for some time to return to the UCAS and try to get back together with his wife. According to the letter, the planning had been going on for several months and his wife could not wait to take him back. Brent had kept a drawer of the desk locked and had asked her not to pry into it, but it was now open and she looked inside, finding a number of letters from Brent's wife inside it, along with a single one-way ticket to New York. As she scanned several of the letters through her tears, she caught one phrase in particular. "My love, I know that you refer to the woman you are living with as your penny ante whore, but you have to remember your promise to give up all your whores when you get home." Yelena had to read the words four times and her world crashed in on her when she fully understood the implications behind them. His love had been all a lie but the betrayal was real enough. She had loved a man who had used her even while he was professing his love for her. Deadened, she went through the motions of calling the police and the ambulance and went through the process of clearing up his affairs. Everyone was very sympathetic and someone took up a collection to have Brent buried, raising enough to allow Yelena to throw a small party at the cafe, where she played the sax that had been his. At the end of the evening, she played what had started as his song then became their song and was now her song. Everyone present agreed that she played it better than he had and she smiled at the congratulations. He was dead and gone and the music was now hers. She took his sax, no, it was hers now, her weapons case, and the small amount of money she had managed to save and left Oslo for England.

In London, she fell in with a man named Scott Torrence. Torrence was a sometime citizen of the UCAS and he was dashing and debonair and knew how to show a woman a good time. He was also a shill for a group of casinos and used his looks and wit to bring well-heeled clients to places where they could lose lots of money and feel good about it. He was handsome and talked well and showed Yelena how she could have a good time. Starved for something, she found that she loved everything about games of chance, no matter what the game was. She won some, she lost some, but she had to have more of it. She was perfect for the role Scott Torrence used her for. Even though Yelena is not beautiful, she can clean up well and can look very nice in a fancy gown. She was more than willing to trade her body for a good time and Scott was not above using her body as a come-on for his clients. He would work his charm on a client then bring Yelena in to seal the deal with sex and drink. She would show the man or woman a good time in bed then take him or her to a casino where she would help Scott's friends strip the client of large amounts of money. Yelena would be seeded with money from the club and encourage the target to bet large sums. For Yelena, it was a win win scenario, as she got to gamble without needing to worry if she lost it and she was paid to do it. This new habit was almost as bad as any of her older ones and, combined with drinking vodka to excess, was her low. She was able to remember the pain and agony of coming off Bliss and managed to resist getting back in the clutches of the drug, but that was about all she managed to do. For five months Torrence took her from London to Paris to Monte Carlo. Her weapons and her sax remained in their cases, although she would take both out once in a while and look at them. She kept the rifle and pistol clean and operable and the sax in tune and frequently wondered at how her life had turned out. One day she woke up in the bed of another man whose name she could not remember with empty bottles of vodka and Champagne littering the floor of the expensive hotel room. Worse, she did not even know where she was or when it was. After throwing up in the bathroom, she looked in the mirror and realized that she did not like what she saw. She left the room with a few thousand nuyen she took from the nearly comatose man in the bed and stopped in hers long enough to pick up her sax and her weapons, along with the money she had managed to squirrel away. She fled Monte Carlo for Italy and reached out to a man she had met years earlier who had specialized in creating identities and bought one from him, fleeing across the ocean to the UCAS for a fresh start at a new life.

Most of her money was used up to buy her new identity and the plane ticket, so she needed a means to survive. She fell back on her old ways, using her body and her talent with a rifle. The UCAS was not really all that different from Greater Europe in the gangs and crime, except that they usually paid better, which was an unexpected plus. She managed to keep off the bottle long enough to get a decent cyber commlink and some other gear, including a nice Harley to carry it all around on. She tracked down a true maestro of the body ink craft in New Orleans and had him work a tapestry on her back. It started with a huge dead tree in the middle of her back, its limbs draped with chains that held the skulls of people she had killed. The number proved too numerous for the chains and she had to have the man put skulls in stacks on the ground around the tree. Rats and serpents moved among the skulls and a host of ghostly forms fills the background. She has had other artists add additional skulls as she travels about and the whole thing is a work of art. Other than her tattoos and an occasional bit of implant repair, her needs proved to be fairly minimal and all she owned fit into the cargo boxes on the Harley, which suits her just fine as she had no thoughts of settling anywhere.

She took to working freelance for the UCAS mobs but decided that she needed someone to arrange things for her. Searching in the right places, she found that she should contact someone going by the name Virtual Goddess. The entity uses some sort of voice modulation when talking in person, but most of the communications are by text and suddenly Yelena had a fixer who would contact her with the details of who wanted her and who the target was. Yelena preferred working with gangs and she set limits on who her targets could be, refusing to kill any more innocent people. Still, even with that sort of prerequisite, there was plenty of work for Yelena once she proved herself. Gangs from New York, Detroit, Chicago, Denver; and other places needed people to take out competitors and traitors and Virtual Goddess was frequently able to work out a contract that paid Yelena better than what she had been making while arranging her own contracts in Europe, even with the standard cut back to the Fixer. The work paid the bills and bought her new equipment. She even ventured outside the UCAS to New Orleans and Los Angeles and returned to Europe several times on assignments. She has proved to be an excellent assassin and is good at her work, a consummate professional when on the job. Still, no matter where she goes, she finds that she cannot escape the demons in her life and still often goes to the bottle when they get too loud in her head and the ghosts of her past try to drag her into their own hell. It is almost impossible to walk past a casino without going in for "just a flutter". She is addicted to the games and knows it, but for now it is under control......maybe. She wins enough that her losses are offset and then some, but that could certainly turn nasty in a short time. She is very much into sex and has taken many lovers in many places but the only real love she allows herself to experience is jazz. Yelena looks for jazz in all its forms and keeps her ears to the ground for a local jazz club wherever she works. She still carries around the sax that she had taken from the apartment when Brent had died. She keeps it because it is a fine instrument, not from any need to keep some sort of link to a dead man who betrayed her trust and her love. Sometimes she can stay away from the bottle and the games for long enough to think she can be normal again, but then the faces of the people she has killed come back and she falls off the wagon yet again.

She had just finished a hit in Seattle for the Ancients, an Elven gang and had hoped to have a few days of relative calm before hitting the road again, but that did not happen. She was hired by a mysterious contact named Sam to hunt down and kill a blood mage that was terrorizing part of Seattle. The fee Sam promised Yelena was better than money. He showed her pictures of a living Tsina Molovna and said he would divulge her location if Yelena took the job he was hiring for. She took the job. In the process of completing the mission, Yelena witnessed a neighborhood pull together to save itself from a horror they should have run from. But this was their home, no matter that it was the Redmond Barrens, where it would be hard to find a building standing that was not in some serious state of decay or already in ruins. People lived in these buildings, even the wrecked ones, and they had nowhere else to go. For them this was the last stand and they stood and fought it, ganger and common sprawl dweller working together. Yelena found things she had cut from her life; things like friendship and a sense of belonging. A human woman named Arc saved her life when she did not have to, cementing a bond that Yelena strangely enough did not want to sever. The Keeb assassin rode with Arc into the battle with the blood mage and managed to kill the spell slinger but as she died, the mage released a lot of potent energy, critically injuring both Yelena and Arc. She might have died there on the street where others fought and and died to destroy the monstrous minion/master of the blood mage, but other survivors found the women and took them to a hospital to recover from wounds. She was in a coma for a bit and might still have died if Sam had not intervened with the hospital staff to give Arc and Yelena the best care possible, which seemed to include not letting them die. When she woke up, she found that her roommate at the hospital was Arc and they struck up a friendship she had not experienced since Brent. Something clicked in her mind and she found, surprisingly, that she wanted to stay. Arc must have felt the same way because she offered to let Yelena stay at her place. Over the next few days in the hospital room, they shared stories about their past, about the friends and enemies that had come together and given their lives in defense of their neighborhood, and about what they wanted from life going forward. With a few words and a shared near-death experience, the two women had become friends; Srui'ken, or Srui, in Or'Zet or something roughly like blood sister in English. Very roughly, as it means far more than that to the Orks. Yelena is now a partner of Arc and has moved in with her. Perhaps this phase of her life will not end as poorly as the others have.

Sam had put in an appearance at the hospital just as Arc and Yelena were congratulating themselves on surviving the fight with the blood mage and the spirit and sharing stories with some friends who had shown up. His appearance was very much like a succubus of myth and perhaps that is what he really is because Yelena felt a pull from him that she had not felt in years. He offered them a new job and promised that it would be easier than fighting the blood mage. Feeling chuffed and good about themselves, they agreed to meet and talk to him about the new job when they were released from the hospital. At the meeting, they were told that there was something fishy about a new nightclub, The Stardust, that had opened on the edge of the Barrens. Sam suspected that the owners were using drugs to kidnap people and wanted the team to go inside the building and find out. He introduced Arc and Yelena to some new associates to replace some old friends who had decided that this sort of life was not for them.

[spoiler=Background]Na’Nele was born in the Ikeja division in Lagos, close to the rain forest. She was the seventh child of twelve and one of the only four to survive into adulthood. Life in Ikeja was hard, but as her father and two older brothers all worked in an Ares factory, at least they had food on the table. From a young age she had to help running the household, including rummaging through garbage piles for anything remotely useful that could be sold or used. It was this that claimed to life of so many children, as they got wounds while going through the piles of trash and those got infected. She also got wounds, but they always seemed to heal in no time.

When she turned ten, things changed. As orks matured faster, she started to fill out and the local area boys started looking at her differently. One evening when she was a little later coming back from the waste piles, two of them assaulted her. While everybody in Lagos carries a weapon of some sorts, if only a knife, normally a ten year old ork should not be able to win against two older area boys. But that was what happened. She managed to dodge their attacks and place a couple of hits on painful places. Unfortunately Area boys never work in groups of two and their friends joined in. She couldn’t fend them all of.

They had just put her against the ground when gunfire ripped through the night. Na’Nele just kept close to the ground, knowing like everybody in Lagos what to do when a gunfight broke out close by. Run or get under cover. When there was a pause in the fight, she made a run for it and went home quickly. When she told the story to her mother, she at first didn’t believe it until she repeated a few of the tricks. While not educated, they weren’t stupid and they knew that she had magical powers. The following day her father took her with him to work and after a quick examination by a mage in the factory she was sold to Ares.

The following years she spent in training as a bodyguard for expeditions going into the rainforest to harvest telesma. While she was a city dweller, Lagos can also be considered a jungle so she adapted quite well. And she quickly learned how to handle guns and she also quickly learned English. Other advanced technology took a bit more time. As Ares employee who already knew the local languages, she was often used as go-between for the expedition leaders and the local porters they used. During one of the trips in the jungle they were attacked by ekyelebenle and while she healed quickly, since then she has a mild allergy to their venom. The venom also attacked some nerves and since then she smells less, which she actually considered a blessing, especially in Lagos.

She did develop her powers more and she also learned to astrally perceive, something very useful while out in the jungle. While all telesma harvesting expeditions always had a mage with them, those were not always useful in combat against paracritters, spirits and other astral critters out there. They even had a monofilament sword made for her that was also a weapon focus so she could combat those critters. By the time she was 18 she was one of their better guards and while back in Lagos she tried to learn as much as possible about various critters so she could recognise them. One thing she didn’t learn was how to drive and the one attempt ended in disaster when she managed to wreck an Ares Roadmaster.

But that was in the future as when she was 16 she was approached by a woman while going back to the compound after a rare visit to her family. She told her about saving a young girl some years ago and wanting to save more. To make a long story short, after an initiation Na’Nele joined the daughters of Yemaja. She quickly became very valuable for the organisation as she had access to transports. When going on an expedition she could easily hide one or two woman among the porters without her employers being any the wiser. When in the city she participated in raids on Cherubiums and things like that. She also kept left-over supplies from expeditions (like medication, water purification tablets, food and things like that) to give to the organization.

It was on a raid like this that things went wrong. She was 18 and had been told she would have to go to the Italy for an assignment. The night before she had to leave she participated in one more raid. Unfortunately among the ones killed were two Ares scientists working on an important project in Lagos (and one was the son of a VP). She didn’t know it then, as the bodies had been burned beyond recognition, but the Ares people did find out she had been involved. So when she had gone into the GeMiTo with a team, they sent her out to scout and then left her. What they hadn’t calculated on was the fact that she had survived hell holes before and she managed to get out. But now she had to survive in a strange country where she was the Oyibos. And on top Ares had of course blocked all her accounts and deleted the SIN they’d given her, leaving her only with the money she still had with Kayin, a hawala in Apapa.

For almost two years she managed to get by, doing odd jobs left and right. She had kept all the stuff Ares had equipped her with, although she did have someone go over it to remove all the tags. During these two years, she did a lot of hooding jobs, continuing what she had been doing with the daughters of Yemaja in Lagos, but also other things. She was wary of going against Ares though, as she believed they still had a large file on her. As she was quite good at navigating in difficult terrain, she quickly found her niche in smuggling groups. Her inability to drive made her unsuited to some jobs, but her uncanny way to spot police patrols a long way off and her ability to find her way in almost any wilderness made her well suited for others. Also the fact that she knew about and could fight off the critters found in said wilderness made her a good add to any smuggler group. She didn’t join one, but worked as freelancer.[/spoiler]